Dimension X and X Minus 1

Thought I'd just take a few minutes to tell you about my new late night listening habit.

When the skies are clear, well, it's astronomy time, and I'm out there with my 10x50s and a drink, enjoying trying to track down the Messier Objects and stars of interest I can see in between the large sycamore trees that dominate my garden area. But when skies are cloudy, lit sickly orange by the streelights, I find other entertainment.

I've recently downloaded through my podcatcher a number of episodes of 1950-51 US radio series Dimension X, and later show X Minus 1. Both are thirty minute sci fi radio playlets, often adaptations of short stories by classic sci fi authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov that had previously turned up in print in magazines like "Astounding Science Fiction." Several, for instance, are taken from Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

Believe me, listening to them outside in the dark is a really atmospheric experience! The stories are of course straight out of the 50s, with maniacally dramatic music and yelling actors at the moment of the "reds under the bed" reveal that half the crewmen of your ship are actually alien agents, or that the parade an eccentric businessman has organised to promote "Mars Day" is in fact a full on Martian Invasion, complete with ray guns. Of course, whatever women show up in these stories are there to scream and be neurotic, but yet, the stories still have more depth and imagination than most of the B pics that were being shown in the cinemas at that time - one talks about how a miniturised man and women act as the beginning of a complex society that evolves and dies on an electron orbiting a proton within 10 of our full scale seconds.

You didn't get that in "It Came from Outer Space"!!!

To Lick a Quantum

The Dimension X story I listened to the other day, featuring a male dissident and a typically attractive woman, involved people being reduced to a size way beyond the sub-atomic, and living their lives on a planet like electron orbiting a nucleus.

In the space of ten of our seconds, Einsteinian time dilation caused them to spawn an entire - presumably rather inbred - race that reached a glorious peak before dying out to leave one last message for folk in the our-scale reality.

*Note - Dimension X and X Minus 1 need an article to themselves one day.*

For some reason, this made me think about the curious property known as Quantum Flavour Number...

Sub atomic particles indeed have a flavour - leptons can be flavoured as electrons, tau particles or muons, ditto their corresponding neutrinos. Quarks are flavoured according to charm, strangeness, topness and bottomness.

As ever, this is essentially made up stuff designed to cover up  immensely complex mathematics and the all but beyond understanding properties of these particles. You could call them "banana, strawberry, blackcurrant and lime" and it wouldn't make a difference.

But what if it really did? What if all the quarks, neutrinos and leptons did actually taste of something. Imagine being shrunk down to a size by which relative to you, an electron is the size of a lollypop. Lick it! Perhaps you might get a jolt of electric charge to add to the experience, but then the flavour bursts through. Is it sharp and citrusy? Or sweet and mellow. Will sucking the cranberry flavoured charmed quark ease an acid bladder? Perhaps a blueberry flavoured tau super neutrino will de-fur your arteries, and reduce your risk of a heart attack?

But the crazy thing is, even this wild surmising is nowhere near as fantastic as the universe of the super small actually is. I don't understand it, and I suspect the number of people on the planet who really do is barely in double figures.

It's a mad universe, however it tastes.